More Infrared

A quick update on the infrared work.  Joe is making great progress on the analysis of his data.  He has an automatic detector running that does a pretty good job of detecting a whale from other background objects.  See the video clip below to see it in action.  It is a infrared video of L pod heading north past the light house on 7/7/2010 at around 3:40 in the morning.  There is even a little spy hop that was captured.  The top figure only displays when a whale is detected.  The bottom figure is the actual footage.  When a whale is detected in the image a rectangle appears around the whale and a distance and temperature difference is displayed.



Joe was even interviewed for King 5 news (with a cameo appearance from Scott helping to determine that this was L pod).  See that coverage here.

Splash Cam Update

During the hydrophone maintenance dive in July, we installed an underwater camera in front of the lighthouse in hopes of catching a glimpse of the whales. So far, the murkiness of the water has prevented us from seeing any orcas, but we have had nice views of rock fish, moon jellies, and, for a split second, a harbor seal! Jason recently cleaned off the lens in an effort to improve our visibility, but it seems we might have an underwater ally who is happily doing that job already. In the first part of the video below, what we believe to be some kind of chiton inches along the camera lens, consuming the grime that has built up on the surface. In the second part of the video, Jason does the same job with a quick swish of a towel -- whose cleaning job is better? You can tell how limited the visibility is based on how little time it takes for Jason to disappear once he starts swimming away. We are hoping that if we make recordings during the spring (before algae blooms begin), we'll have better luck filming the whales. More acoustics updates coming soon!

NOTE: Sorry about the yellow hue in this video; it has since gone away...